Let me introduce you to Boyfriend. He’s Welsh (as you may have guessed) but without a Welsh accent. Just a northern twang. This is something which troubles him from time to time: “I wish I sounded more Welsh. Maybe I should start using a Welsh accent.” He likes: talking to himself — right now, in the background, I can hear him talking to a candle. “Don’t you just love watching a candle inside a jam jar, then cutting off its supply of oxygen. It looks just like death,” he says with a disturbing smirk on his face. He also likes cats. One moment I’ll be walking down an ordinary residential street in Brussels, where we live, holding his hand, and the next he is on his knees looking underneath a car (parked, luckily) after seeing a black cat, singing “hellloww, do you want to come home? now, pleeese.” It takes me a while to drag him away from the poor terrified cat who is definitely not willing to be Boyfriend’s newest friend.
Less dangerous activities he likes include feeling smug when someone just misses the Metro while he is comfortably on the train, then watching that person’s angry, dismayed face as the train pulls out, taking pictures of girl scouts, and knowing every lyric to every Beatles’ song ever. I decided, stupidly, to challenge him on that last point. We were sat at a studenty cafe with rainbow coloured chairs somewhere in central Brussels drinking mint tea one afternoon. I picked what I thought was a less-well-known Beatles song and got him to tell me the lyrics. Honey Pie (my favourite), Blackbird, Maxwell’s Silver Hammer - he knew them all, and not just the chorus.
Boyfriend is excellent at getting himself into situations that other, more practical, people probably would be able to avoid. Map reading is definitely one of his least developed skills. Ask him where north is and he’ll probably say something like “ummm, which way is the wind coming from?” This is, undoutedly, a theme that will reoccur in this blog. Other things he has been known to do include dropping his ipod into the bath (he was reaching forward for his watch, forgetting that his headphones were attached to something - and then hearing the ipod slip with a gentle splosh into the water) and window shopping - meaning taking a close look at ladies’ underwear and not realising the shop assistant was standing in the shop window until he looked up and saw her scornful face.
Tags: boyfriend, Welsh, candle, smirk, cat, Metro, smug, Beatles, lyrics, rainbow, mint tea, Brussels
